1. Technical Field
This invention relates to the field of telecommunications and more particularly to an dynamically modifiable interactive voice response system.
2. Description of the Related Art
When using a interactive voice response (IVR) system, there are two major issues that hamper greater customer or caller satisfaction. First, the assignment and prioritization of voice ports and second, a proper menu choice prompting sequence. In other words, if an IVR menu has several choices, which choice should be first, second and so forth is not necessarily given much thought after implementation. Existing solutions basically rely upon the past statistics like a call duration, and possibly use human factors expertise and business needs to decide the menu option sequence of presentation apriori.
Several references discuss IVR systems and tailoring or customization of menus of individual callers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,487,277 to Beyda, et al. discusses tailoring the menu for an individual caller by monitoring the caller's pattern of prompt selection. U.S. Pat. No. 6,459,776 to Aktas, et al. discusses another system where individual caller profiles are personalized with different messages and interfaces. None of the existing solutions continually monitor incoming calls and dynamically modify menu choices and sequences and assignment of voice ports in an interactive voice response system. Nor do any of the existing systems change sequences menu choices and prompts on a global basis for all callers based on real-time data.